according to the shaft of his weapon. His word for penis was tank.
His motto was “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.”
TWENTY-SIX IMAGINARY T-SHIRTS
1) Anonymous 2) Written in blue ballpoint
on a Band-Aid: DOWN WITH GRAVITY!
3) Breathing Expert for Hire 4) Profile of a man
with a Chihuahua hanging from his chin
5) Don’t Misbehave Tonight 6) Die and Learn
7) The best way to wipe out poverty is to
wipe out poor people. Signed—the GOP 8) MUST SEE:
Fully equipped fashionable sonnet with
gorgeous slant rhyme and modest allusions. Missing
half of last couplet. 9) I am no food. 10) I’m not shy,
I’m sober. 11) A face half Ali circa Rumble in the
Jungle, half Elvis circa sequined Las Vegas
karate getup. Caption: Float like a blue suede shoe.
12) Let’s pretend I’m still in love with youth.
13) IMMACULATE MATH: If Mary wakes an hour
early for a month, at the end of that month
Mary will have more than a day. How much time will
Mary have by May? 14) “This Is Not an Exit”
means “Do Not Enter.” 15) A worm slinking from the left
nostril to the right above the caption: May Enkidu find
no peace tonight. 16) My hand wasn’t in my ass, I was pulling
out my wallet! 17) Empty Pillbox. Caption: FDA-approved
pill for inducing amnesia. 18) The president in a blindfold
of lizards. Caption: QUANDARY 19) Freud’s Auto
Repair Shop 20) Albert Einstein in snake-red
stilettos and lab coat above the caption: Relatively
too much time. 21) U.S. map above the caption:
The only thing that fucks you
up more than poverty is wealth. 22) Did you call me,
Valentine? 23) We won’t get caught.
24) X for only one-third the pornography sold here.
25) You can have my husband, but please
don’t mess with my man. 26) Zero preservatives.
MUSIC TO INTERROGATE BY
When they ask what you did when you found the man
crouched at your door, his blood greening the steps,
you will have to say, He was not there; I did not see him.
The noise spread to the edge of the state. You had no
power, but what you had was the same color as power,
like rain in the thread of a jacket. What did you do after
spitting out the name of your leader? Were there no
bullets to trouble him? Was there no spell to blind him?
When they ask what you did when you heard of the prisoners,
when you heard of the war against ideas, when they beat
strangers from their houses, what will you say? Who cares
about the fires beyond your porch? When the war spread
the brothers and fathers, blood of your age, to the borders,
what did you do? the children will ask. When the wafer
of destruction lay in your mouth, and the men in charge
charged men and sent men charging, when the field
was charged, the oil at its heart, the burials cocooned,
where were your feet? they’ll ask, and what will you say?
I will have to admit I was one of them. I believed the holes
would be erased. Our leader knew this floating up a mountain
on the backs of soldiers. I wanted only to be free, a cup of water,
if not rain. But the war spread to the edges of the state, narrow
closets opened in the field, the petals were white as cuffs.
What I had was the same as power, a dampness in the thread
of an old jacket. There was something sad and unforgiving
about our leader’s accent, his short yellow tongue like a pencil
with no eraser. When they ask or wonder without asking
what I did when I saw the slick and shameful, the naked men
hanging an inch from the ground, when they ask what I did
when I heard of the prisoners, when I heard of the wars against
ideas, when they exiled strangers, what will I say? That’s why
God et cetera? Who said you need not arm your children,
nor send them off to war? Who cares about the past worn
smooth by error and friction? The wafer of damage lay charged
in my mouth, bleeding its oil. I walked the back roads
of my property with one shoe untied and the other in my hand.
THE MUSTACHE
Nightshade sash, velvet patch
In the complexion. You might feel
Yourself vanish into the diesel fog,
The obliterating light and dark of it.
Shadow carved by what divides
The mind and tongue. As if suspended
Less than an inch above the speech,
As if the lip could bear so much history.
For instance, black as the smartest
Girl in class. Black as Hitler’s cowlick
Or black as the valance falling from a widow’s
Window. Black as the house sacked
Behind that window, and the boots
Coming and going on the stairs,
Or the breathing of a boy locked
In the mirror. Someone washing
His hands wearing black gloves.
The smell of greased metal, smoke
So thick it thins but does not vanish,
Black as a train snaking beneath
The eye, as the roads telling you
How the rain tattles on everything
It touches. The pavement has no way
Of knowing the future leading
Into the valley. The wood of burning
Barnyards and bones, ash coughed out
And covering, gaunt and haunted,
Quiver of rhetoric. Oh, the weight of it,
Possible as grief and hesitation,
As blindness and the wind-struck structures,
Edged and peripheral mustache,
Part fastened fashion, part flag or shadow
Of the flag on this hysterical country.
COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE
a pecha kucha after Fela Kuti
[DOG EAT DOG (Instrumental)]
Inside the coffin was a tomb. Inside the mouth of the bullhorn
was a tomb. Inside the stems of the violets: tombs.
Inside the thin blue shawl of the afternoon and of the dusk.
Inside the words awe, freedom, territory, fatigue.
[WITCHCRAFT]
In one village I came to a woman shaped like a bird
and was given a knife as long as a feather. In another
a woman spit a curse to break me like an egg, its sweetness
running between my fingers like something the body makes.
[BEASTS OF NO NATION]
I was born in the year of the war between wars.
I was born to a religion I thought could not hold me
ransom, to sermons walking on the back of the wind.
I was pulled from death’s pocket and cradled in its hand.
[YELLOW FEVER]
My father was the sunlight now, but I couldn’t understand
a word he sang. When his teeth were removed
and tossed glittering along the tracks of the trains,
I was quiet as the indicted. I myself was the music I lacked.
[GENTLEMAN]
In each village when I tried to tell them I was an American,
AmenAmenAmenAmenAmen spilled like ash from my mouth,
and they knew what it meant. Everywhere I was made
to dance like a man carrying his head before they cast me out.
[ROFOROFO FIGHT]
To be holy. To be united. To be untied. Could I ask or answ
er you,
I would be three things at once, I said to the coffin. To be uneyed,
unheavied, and alive, I said. To be the light on all the disappearing.
Words. To be burning and washed away. To be lit inside.
[ZOMBIE]
I walked, I walked, I walked. I was not noble, heroic,
compassionate holding the shadow of a name in the world.
I’d seen the scalp scorched by the way things used to be.
Including the smoke rising from the mind like a wing.
Including the hair burned of its ability to dream.
[EGBE MI O (CARRY ME)]
I carried a child’s imagination, the uses of money,
the philosophies of grace, the paradoxes of revenge.
I carried a prayer book with words as small as the screws
in the glasses of the blind. I carried bad bad bad bad
badbadbadbad things, and the weight made my teeth ache.
[IKOYI BLINDNESS]
For Jesus Christ Our Lord. For the Grace of Almighty Lord.
For the wound and the bitter spit of the accused,
for the scar resting against my wrist for the rest of my life.
Because what I feared was in me was in me,
I wanted to lie still in the body like a knife.
[WATER NO GET ENEMY]
What I liked about its weight was what I liked about the sky
as red at the beginning of the day as it was at the end.
The gravity that was guilt or history. The darkness
that was smoke or cloud. The burning that was washed away.
[J’EHIN, J’EHIN (CHOP TEETH, CHOP TEETH)]
In one village vultures clapped their beaks at me;
they clapped their wings like the silly flags of providence
twisting against themselves. The body was soft,
the body was what I bore, the body was what I ate.
[NO AGREEMENT PART 2]
Inside the red of a feeling and irrevocably so. Inside the blood,
inside the yolk which is a warning. Inside the ghosts,
the field of oaths and conviction, the contracts of the state
going to business and busying the breath,
the eyes basked in the aesthetics of blindness.
[MISTER FOLLOW FOLLOW]
I almost described the leaves shining on their bones
and the snakes roosting in their sheaths to the coffin.
And the valley where all the headstones were smoldering.
But there was nothing left to be said, so I said it again and again.
[SHUFFERING AND SHMILING PART 2]
I carried it on my back like a man with one wing.
I carried it against my chest like a door with no housing.
With the blood which was its contrition. With the iron
which was its name. With the hunger which was its belonging.
[TROUBLE SLEEP]
I was born with my fingers on the latch of a coffin
hot with the sunlight spilling upon its face, locked
like a window in a building on fire. For Jesus Christ
Our Lord or against him. For the Grace of the Almighty.
[ORIGINAL SUFFER HEAD]
My coffin the moth house, my coffin with no message
or lover. My coffin cooled by stars spilling on its face.
My coffin the mouth. My body could have fit inside its body
and drifted downstream to the center of the earth.
[SHAKARA]
After my mother sang the only hymn she knew,
she tore her black dress open the way one tears
a scab from its address, and I saw the skinny knife
she kept hidden between her breasts.
[EVERYTHING SCATTER]
I am not in the village filled with prophets. I am feeling
elegiac for our cataclysms, the blood in the yolk
when the egg breaks, the grief stripped of its shell.
I am filled with the hollowness of holiness and breath.
[YE YE DE SMELL]
I am the inside the village reddened by readiness.
Inside the word tear and tear and fatigue. Inside
the terror which makes territory evaporate.
Where the sunlight braiding my scalp is on my mind.
[COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE]
He dead yeah nownownownownow, the villagers sang,
when I tried to tell them I was alive.
He dead yeah nownownownownow, the villagers sang,
as I carried my coffin toward them. He dead yeah
nownownow, the villagers sang, as I carried it away.
[COCKTAILS WITH ORPHEUS]
BULLETHEAD FOR EARTHELL
I don’t know what the soul mutters
in the moment before the slang
of gunshots, sweat jeweling
the brow, braggadocio jumping
from the skin, blood thrusting out
a feverish gasp, the wish for nothing
worth holding between the hands
turned up to Heaven, but I know
if it happens, you must be my grandfather
at the moment of an ambush one
morning in Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley.
Because in the moment before death
none of the moments before that,
I know, bear the same risks.
A naked towel turned up to Heaven
on the bed with the same sprawl
of softness as the woman upon it, I realize
in the moment preceding the moment
of death, does not represent the moment
of death. It could be the broth of a spasm,
the fever of gasping, the moment of death.
It could be the fitful woman holding you
to earth as the seed leaves your body.
Even a boy with no father carries in him
the image of his father. And it must be abstract
as dream, pure theory, the moment of death.
If you are good, and even if you are not good,
the bullet enters the blood like the bony finger
of the god who put it there, and the future
scampers down to cover you. Granddaddy,
when my father, the first time I met him,
tried to recall your face, there was nothing
but smoke coaxing our history from his breath.
SUPPORT THE TROOPS!
I’m sorry I will not be able to support any soldiers
at this time. I have a family and a house with slanting floors.
There is a merciless dampness in the basement,
a broken toilet, and several of the windows are painted shut.
I do not pretend my dread is anything like the dread
of men at war. Had I smaller feet, I would have gladly enlisted
myself. In fact, I come from a long line of military men.
My grandfather died heroically in 1965, though his medals have been
lost. I try to serve my country by killing houseflies. I am fully
aware of their usefulness, especially in matters of decay.
Napoleon’s surgeon general, Baron Dominique Larrey,
reported during France’s 1829 campaign
in Syria that certain species of fly only consumed
what was already dead and had a positive effect on wounds.
I bet when my grandfather was found,
his corpse shimmered in maggots, free of disease. As you can
tell, I know a little something about civilization.
I realize that when you said “freedom,” you were talking
about the meat we kill for, the head of the enemy leaking
in the bushes, how all of it makes peace possible.
Without firearms I know most violence would be impractical.
I thank you, nonetheless, for mentioning how soldiers
exist to defend my way of life. I am sure
any one of them would be an excellent guardian of my
house. I admit I have no capacity for rifles or gadgetry.
I cannot use rulers accurately. I realize
the common fly, like the soldier, is what makes us civilized.
And I admit my awe looking on the marine with a talent
for making the eagle tattooed across his back rear its talons.
I realize were it not for the sacrifices of these young boys,
America would no longer have its source
of power. I have given considerable thought to your
offer, but I simply am unable to offer my support.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS?
I would eat you, were it not for the pain
of my big tooth wiggling like one of those small doors
cut into doors so that pets, small dogs mostly,
can come and go as they please. What I have eaten of you
tastes like mint and damp clay, tastes exactly like the soil
I ate in my grandmother’s yard as a boy. They called
me savage then, because I reeked and wreaked havoc
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